The Distant Land of My Father (10 page)

We had, in a way, and when he turned and left my room, I hurt inside, but I also felt proud of myself. I had managed to do what I’d wanted most: I had managed not to cry, and when he told me that everything was all right, I had pretended to believe him.

the wounded

THERE WAS HEAVY RAIN AND WIND
that Saturday night and all day Sunday, too, as though this was the way weather was now. The sounds of the storm were constant: the rain dripped evenly from the tile roof onto the pebbled path below my room, the wind shoved the poplars roughly against the window screens. But it wasn’t just the weather. Everything seemed different. I was allowed to stay up later, and no one bothered about what I ate. Chu Shih rarely left the kitchen. He sat at the table whistling softly through his teeth while he read
Shên Pao,
Shanghai’s leading daily Chinese newspaper, or
Damei wanbao,
the Chinese edition of the American
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.
Or he cleaned, scrubbing the kitchen counters, the pots and pans, the floor, as though if things were just clean enough, our lives would return to normal. He refused to leave the kitchen except to sleep, and when he heard my mother’s footsteps, he watched the door intently, waiting to see what news she would have, or what she might need. He seemed to think that anything could happen.

My father turned on the radio in the den whenever he was within earshot, and my mother snapped it off as soon as he was out of range. She said there was more than enough evidence of the Battle of Shanghai around us without having to hear about it all day. I thought she was right. The sky was dark and filled with smoke that made my eyes sting, and when the wind blew, it brought the fumes of the Japanese funeral pyres from across Soochow Creek. The pounding of the guns of the Japanese warships moored in the Whangpoo shelling the city and of the bombs and anti-aircraft guns over Chapei was there all the time. The terrifying
boom!
when I stood with my father that Friday night on the verandah soon became routine, a dull thud in the background that frightened me only when I remembered what it was.

On Sunday night there was a knock at our front door just after my mother had turned out my lights and left my room. It was after ten, late for visitors, and Jeannie, my father’s German shepherd, barked loudly. I lay in my bed on sheets that were damp from the humidity, and I listened hard to my father’s muted voice from downstairs as he told Jeannie to hush. I heard the door open, and then I heard him say something else, and I heard alarm in his voice. He called for my mother, who said, “What is it, Joe?” and I glimpsed her hurrying along the upstairs hallway, tying the sash of her white satin robe. When she reached the entryway, I heard her say, “Oh, no,” almost as though she’d been hurt, and then she said, “Mac, what’s happened to you?”

I got out of bed and tiptoed to my doorway. From there I could just see the top of the front door and a neat triangle of the entry, where Dr. McLain, our neighbor and my father’s friend and physician, stood staring at my parents as if in disbelief. He was filthy. His dark hair was unwashed and in disarray, and his suit was rumpled and dirty. My mother hurried toward the kitchen, calling for Chu Shih, while my father led Dr. McLain into the living room. I crept onto the landing at the top of the stairs and leaned against the staircase railing, holding it tight to keep myself still. I leaned back when I heard my mother’s footsteps coming from the kitchen. She carried a tray that held a bottle of Scotch and three glasses. A linen towel was draped over her arm.

Dr. McLain sat on the edge of the leather ottoman near the doorway. I saw my mother lean toward him and I saw him take a glass of Scotch and the towel she offered, which he used to wipe his face. Then my mother sat down where I couldn’t see her. I guessed she and my father were sitting on the divan.

Dr. McLain sat forward and held his head in his hands, and even from my perch some distance away, I could see that he was exhausted. My father asked a question I couldn’t hear, and Dr. McLain shook his head, then he sat up straighter, his arms braced at his sides, as though holding himself up. He took a breath and he began to talk.

“It was unbelievable,” he started. “You’ve no idea, no concept . . .” He paused, as if he was waiting for someone to finish his sentence.

“Go on,” my father said quietly, not with encouragement, but with a grim okay-let’s-hear-it tone in his voice. I inched down two more stairs, though I risked being caught, and I leaned forward so that I could hear.

Dr. McLain said he had been at home when the bombs had dropped yesterday afternoon, the day that was already being called Bloody Saturday. He had driven to St. Marie’s Hospital as soon as he’d understood what had happened, not waiting to be called, just knowing he would be needed.

“At the hospital, the Sisters told the survivors to wait wherever there was space,” he said. “They filled up the hallways, the men’s out-patient ward, the reception areas, even the courtyard. All the time we worked, they were screaming, but not just from pain. They were screaming for attention. They understood that we weren’t going to waste any time on the ones we thought wouldn’t make it. They were the ones we just—” Dr. McLain coughed, and there was a long pause. When he continued, his voice was anguished. “They were the ones that we injected with morphine, then asked them to wait in the hallway of the outpatient ward. ‘Be seated here, please, until someone can see you. Yes, you’ll have to wait a while longer.’ Wait for what? To die. And it worked. Just a while ago, as I was finally leaving the hospital, I forced myself to look into that hallway. There was no one left.”

Our house was quiet for a long moment, then my mother murmured something I couldn’t hear. I saw my father stand next to Dr. McLain and refill his empty glass with Scotch. When my father sat down, Dr. McLain went on.

“On my way over here,” he said, “I was thinking about medical school, about a lecture on amputations, and how I thought,
I’ll never do this, what a waste of time. I could be studying.
” He took a long drink. “I have no idea how many arms and legs and hands and feet I amputated today. It was like a factory: remove an arm on this girl, a leg on this young man, another arm on the old woman in the corner, the right foot of the baby against the wall. There was no end to it.”

I suddenly felt sick and afraid, and I tried to take a breath, but I ended up choking. My mother heard and called my name, and I hurried to the safety of my room, my curiosity overpowered by fear of getting caught. My mother called my name again and I said nothing, and they left me alone.

I lay in my bed, my heart pounding, and my room seemed alive. Outside, a sudden gust of wind whooshed the trees into the window hard, as though something much stronger than I was trying to get inside. I tried to think of good things, which was what my mother told me to do when I was afraid. I thought of Mass, a place that made me feel safe. I tried to imagine being in the Cathedral, but the images of church mixed with those of the hospital, and the people in the pews were missing arms and legs and hands and feet. Dr. McLain was picking up pieces of people and trying to stitch them back together with twine.

I tried to think of other things. I practiced my times tables, something I hadn’t been taught yet but knew I would be eventually. I did the answers in my head, counting on fingers under the sheets. Four times four was sixteen. Five times five was twenty-five. Six times six was thirty-six. It was the highest I’d gone, and I kept going up to eight times eight, then started again. Finally I heard Dr. McLain leaving. I listened to the murmur of my parents’ voices downstairs, and then I heard their steps on the stairs. They stood at my doorway for a moment as I pretended to sleep. Then they turned and walked down the hall together in silence.

Still I stayed awake, still the wind blew at the trees outside, still I was terrified if I closed my eyes. When I could stand it no more, I took the extra blanket from the foot of my bed and crept down the stairs and through the house to the kitchen. Standing at the door to Chu Shih’s room, I knocked softly and heard a rustling. Chu Shih muttered something, and finally the door opened.

I whispered, “I’m afraid.”

He did not hesitate but simply took my hand and led me into the dim softness of his room, where he wrapped the blanket around me and picked me up and laid me on his bed. He spoke to me in a Mandarin whose gentle tone I understood, if not its words. And then he lay on the floor next to the bed, and I fell asleep to the solid, even sound of his breath.

My father predicted that the whole thing would be over in a week or so, and he said that despite the horror of Bloody Saturday, the battle really didn’t concern us. The borders of the International Settlement and the French Concession were guarded by American and British soldiers and by the Shanghai Volunteers, and the fighting was restricted to Greater Shanghai, Chapei, which was the Chinese section of Shanghai, and Hongkew, the Japanese section of the International Settlement, on the north side of Soochow Creek. While he admitted that the battle was cause for some concern and the source of some inconvenience, he said he could not imagine it becoming more than that.

It was, he said, a spectator’s war, and at the start, despite my mother’s objections, he liked to join the journalists who watched the battle from the roofs of the city’s skyscrapers. The dining room on the roof of the Park Hotel and the Tower, a small nightclub on the top of the Cathay, were his favorites. From those vantage points, drinks in hand, he and the others could see the shooting and street fighting around the city while Japanese shells made graceful arcs overhead as they traveled southward from Chapei to Nantao. My father was transfixed. Buildings glowed, the sky filled with dark smoke, and the roofs nearby were crowded with people like him, foreigners who were far too fascinated with the fighting below to pay any attention to the Municipal Council’s warnings about the danger of flying shrapnel.

Despite my father’s frequent assurance that everything was all right, I worried. I had come to understand that adults could be wrong. I saw, when my parents and I drove through the city, that everything looked different. The streets were always packed with refugees trying to reach the Settlement or the Concession on foot or rickshaw or bicycle. The pavement was still stained with blood, even after the repeated use of disinfectant and sand. The smell was horrible, especially when the sun came out. One day in the car my father muttered that the city smelled like a charnel house, a word I didn’t know. I asked what it meant, something he usually encouraged, but he snapped at me. “More questions?” he said. “You don’t see that you’re not part of this conversation?” I was stung. At home I went straight to his huge
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary
in the den. I had no idea how to spell the word I hadn’t known, so I just stood glaring at words I couldn’t read, my face hot with anger and hurt and tears.

The Battle of Shanghai was not over in a week. There were more bombs, the fighting grew more intense, the shelling constant, all of which my father seemed to take as a personal affront. He complained about the Chinese military’s lack of training, and about Chiang’s lack of resolve, and about the downturn in his business, thanks to the battle. He complained about the barbed-wire fences that he said were growing like weeds, and about the rigid security at the boundaries of the Settlement and Concession that made getting around the city take twice as long. The gates to the Settlement and Concession closed at night, and the Municipal Council imposed a 10
P.M
. curfew, which put a damper on his social life. Though my parents still went out at night, to parties or dinner or the movies, their evenings became less predictable. On a Friday night late in September my father insisted on attending a dinner he and my mother had been invited to weeks ago. But when they got there, they found they were the only guests. The others, their hostess explained matter-of-factly, had been wounded on Nanking Road.

Each night at dinner my father listed his latest grievances. The banks moved from the Bund and the middle of town to the less central, less convenient French Concession. Some of the big shops closed, and the Country Club and some of the nightclubs were transformed into makeshift hospital wards where the Chinese wounded were cared for. He complained about evacuation. More and more of his friends were sending their wives and children home. He considered them alarmists.

And then, gradually, the complaining stopped and my father himself seemed to almost come to a halt during that fall. When the battle didn’t end quickly, when friends packed up and left, when the city he loved became transformed, he, too, was changed. The violation of the safety of the International Settlement and what had seemed like the guarantee of extrality—events that were unthinkable to my father—left him at sea. Other fathers appeared businesslike and even prepared for what was happening. They matter-of-factly set about the business of repatriation, making certain their passports were in order, asking their wives to see that the family’s trunks were packed, booking passages for their families to Hong Kong or Manila or Singapore, or even home, and planning to follow as soon as their businesses were in order. They paid the servants, saw to it that their houses would be closed tight, and arranged to stay at apartments on the Bund.